Thursday, August 18, 2011

Private Eye Writers Banquet; Literary Brooklyn

FROM ROBERT J. RANDISI, President Private Eye Writers if America

Hey Guys,

Can we get this info on your site, please? Tickets are available for the PWA Banquet in St. Louis.

Fri., Sept. 16, 2011, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM at a St. Louis institution. Tickets are $60, buses will leave from the Convention Hotel to the venue. Email Christine Matthews ar RRandisi@aol.com for more information, or to order tickets.

RJR

-------------------------------LITERARY BROOKLYN

Brooklyn Takes a Bow as a Town of Writers
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: August 16, 2011

“Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in,” the chorus of an improbably lovely song by the Avett Brothers implores. “Are you aware the shape I’m in?”

Amy Wilton
Evan Hughes
LITERARY BROOKLYN
The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life
By Evan Hughes
337 pages. Henry Holt & Company. $17.
Related

Excerpt: 'Literary Brooklyn' (pdf)

Patricia Wall/The New York Times
For generations — long before it became fashionable — Brooklyn has taken in writers fleeing from Manhattan’s steep rents and steeper pretensions. In the first sentence of “Sophie’s Choice” (1979), William Styron’s narrator, Stingo, turns out his pockets and says, “In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.”

It’s been a refuge too for those who simply needed some quiet, a place that had human scale and dirt under its fingernails. “Young men were writing manifestos in the higher magazines of Manhattan,” Thomas Wolfe said in the 1930s about his years in the borough, “but the weather of man’s life, the substance and structure of the world in which he lives, was soaking in on me in those years in Brooklyn.”

As anyone who has paid attention to the Book Review, Styles and Dining sections of The New York Times is aware, things have changed in Brooklyn. Over the past decade or two it has filled with heat-seeking young writers, editors, artists and chefs, so much so that it’s become the butt of unfair but funny anti-hipster tirades. The novelist Colson Whitehead was compelled to cool the warm jets in 2008 by writing a witty essay in The Times titled: “I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It.”

For the rest go here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/books/literary-brooklyn-by-evan-hughes-review.html